Study on Innovation in Product Design Considering Aesthetics and Ergonomics

Abstract

Ergonomics based design offers safe, comfortable and efficient products by considering human aspects. Ergonomically designed products prevent fatigue and discomfort. On the other hand, aesthetics as a link between a product and the user’s emotion contributes to obtaining more desirable products for the user. To develop products with aesthetic and ergonomic benefits, multiple factors must be considered simultaneously.
The literature presents the strategic focus on product design, arguing that the aesthetics and ergonomics dimensions may help a product to be a commercial success. The designer’s decision-making in the concept design stage has a significant impact in the success of the product. Therefore, parametric and generative design become suitable approaches in the design process. Additionally this thesis presents a hybrid methodology to be adopted in concept design stage. This methodology will also utilise a parametric design algorithm.
This proposed research work aims towards a multi-criteria algorithm to assist the designer in the concept design phase to come up with better product design considering aesthetic and ergonomic criteria. The fundamental contribution of the algorithm lies in its focus on multi-criteria analysis and its ability to include new factors in the evaluation of possible solutions. Aesthetic and ergonomic concepts like golden ratio, form, colour, texture, gender and anthropometry composed these multi criteria. To develop this new methodology a thorough literature review was used. The purpose of this study is to find product evaluation methods considering aesthetics and ergonomics and does not consider public surveys for evaluation. Problems in the aesthetic evaluation are discussed later in the work. A case study is used to validate this design methodology. Finally, the aesthetics and ergonomic elements were modified by using Grasshopper software as a graphical algorithm editor. The results indicate a need for reliable objective evaluation methods. As a consequence of the study, suggestions for improving and applying existing methods are proposed.